Sunday, September 26, 2010

UFO Case: Cuba, 1967

Like I have mentioned in previous posts, I have been reading Top Secret/MAJIC by UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman. A detailed review is to come shortly, but I wanted to write about an incident that Friedman brings up in the book.

It was 1967 at Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Florida. This base is about as close as you can get to Cuba and still be in the U.S. A former military intelligence operative who was stationed there at the time, confided a rather incredible story to Friedman.

The duty of an intelligence officer is normally rather bland at best. They are expected to be fluent in the language of the enemy, in this case both Spanish and Russian. They sit and listen to chatter on the enemy's military broadcast channels. This is usually about as exciting as watching candle wax dry. Should anything of note occur, the incident is to be written up and an exact transcript of the event is turned over to the higher ups, usually the fine folks at the NSA (National Security Agency). On a day in 1967, things were anything but boring to one man who was monitoring Cuban radio transmissions.

The Cuban Air Defense force detected an unknown aircraft heading for Cuban airspace at a speed of about MACH 1. A pair of MiG-21 fighters were scrambled to intercept. As the planes neared their target, the pilots reported that the craft was a single, solid, silver-colored metal sphere with no markings or appendages. The intelligence officer immediately sat up, realizing that what they were talking about was a UFO.

As the UFO crossed over the Cuban mainland, the pilots were given the order to shoot it down. They achieved radar lock on and armed their missiles. That was when one of the pilots began screaming into his radio. The officer listening in could detect the faint crackle of something in the background.

The distressed pilot reported that his wingman's plane just disintegrated. The UFO then shot up to 100,000 feet at a speed of MACH 5.

When the intelligence officer reported this transpiring to his superiors, the matter went up the food chain. That was when the NSA deviated from policy and requested that the actual tape recordings of the intercepted transmissions be turned over to them and that the officer log that the MiG was lost due to "mechanical failure."

A research associate of Friedman's made a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA and the Air Force regarding the event. A threatening letter was the only response given, one that demanded to know the name of the individual who had leaked "classified" information. Friedman refused to give up his source, but did spend a few sleepless nights, wondering if the Men In Black might actually come for him.

They never did, but the case remains an interesting one. The government's reaction to the FOIA request would seem to indicate that there is indeed something to all of this. Yet the problem is one that is ever so common in UFO research: the evidence is all hearsay at this point. What we really have amounts to a narrative that begins "some guy told me that..." Hardly the sort of thing that could stand up in court, let alone to the scientific method. It makes sense, however, that these sorts of obstacles exist due to the growing amount of evidence of a cover-up. Would you place yourself on the line after signing security papers that warn of "the penalty of death?" Plus, the government's official response is not necessarily one that indicates an alien presence. The UFO could have been a secret military program being tested in hostile airspace. I don't find that hypothesis to be very likely as the described actions of the object outperform anything in our current inventory, to say nothing of what was available to us in 1967. Seems to me that if we indeed had a weapon that worked that well, we would have seen a lot of it since then. Would've come in nice and handy over Vietnam, a conflict that was raging at the time.

If this was a real occurrence and if the object was not of our possession (I know, there's all those pesky ifs again), then it is a critical case of a UFO engaging an Earth military power...and winning rather decidedly.

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I'm a writer, scholar, and researcher in the Chicago area. I have an M.A. in Writing from DePaul University. What do I write? Science fiction mostly. What do I research? Rhetoric and composition theory, all things Fortean...as well as other unpopular things.
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